domain:savenshine.com
anti_dan
23m ago
If Republican candidate quality matters in a red state, the Dems aren't close to being down and out.
WhiningCoil
28m ago
Small changes in daily lived experiences can have an outsized impact. The crime rate can hardly budge on paper, but things that might poll as "crime" can increase exponentially in your daily life. Where I used to live was fine on paper. I lived there for about 15 years. Then things started getting really weird. Some things would show up on paper as "crime". Gas station on the corner kept getting robbed repeatedly. There was a shooting and a shooter on the loose in my townhouse parking lot after we had our first child. Women were getting dragged off the trails and raped in attacks so lurid and on the nose you'd think they were made up had there not been so much physical evidence and they caught the guy. Turns out sometimes, just sometimes, rapist do wait in the bushes to ambush women jogging on a trail in broad daylight. Same trail we'd walk our infant daughter on in her stroller.
There were plenty of non-"crime" stuff that just added to the overall ambiance of chaos. People suddenly started stopping me in my car on the street and screaming at me for money. There were more loitering gangs of kids smoking and shouting obscenities at my wife as we walked by. Often on the playgrounds we'd go to take our daughter to... and then think better of it. More stores started locking things up. But if you complained about it, some shithead was always there to remind you "Town USA's crime rate is actually below average per capita! And year and year crime has barely budged!" I don't know how to reconcile those insistences with the stark change in my daily life.
So I left. And in the last 5 years I haven't caught a wif of a crime or "crime" anywhere in my proximity. No stores I shop at have gotten robbed, I haven't driven by a house with a squad of police cars trying to disarm a hostage situation (I forgot to mention that one in my old locale). There are no strong "civilization is at the edge of chaos" vibes like I used to get on a daily basis, per capita be damned.
Then who makes money from the food industry.
Processing and manufacturing adds a great deal of value, the actual industrial part of the food industry is huge.
You also got commodity traders and other middlemen, the people who profit from price volatility, storage, transportation, etc; whom you need to stabilize prices.
Then there's input suppliers, the people that sell farmers seeds and equipment.
And I'm not going to name all the other middlemen like the various distributors, who in turn have their own suppliers and logistical needs.
Food supply chains are at once critical, complex and old, which means that they are very highly regulated, involve a ton of actors and have been optimized to absurdity.
There are ways a public option could actually cut prices, but they all involve unacceptable tradeoffs like compromizing food safety standards, not having reliable output or operating at a loss. Not having to pay taxes (which is advanced here as the main method of savings) is far from enough.
You can actually operate at a loss if you want, the commissaries operated by DeCA seem like an obvious example. But you have to accept one of the tradeoffs. There's simply no beating capitalism at making interchangeable consumer goods cheap, it's the one thing it's incredibly good at.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
46m ago
He has the head of the longshoreman’s union and the head of NATO writing effusive love letters that wouldn’t be out of place addressed to a Chinese emperor.
That is not evidence of Mandate of Heaven, many a failing despot and warlord has required submission and effusive praise while in process losing the grip of power. You know, end of Qing emperors comes to mind. It is evidence of lack of virtue on Trump's part, both on counts requiring subjects to verbally prostrate themselves and being so easily flattered.
And are you certain that young men will be turned off by that message?
In my experience a lot of young men would actually like to get married, and recognition that excessive porn use or video games are actively emasculating them is pretty common.
They rely on cheap dopamine fixes and are stuck in perpetual adolescence because of structural problems in the economy and the education system, which republicans are the only party actually trying to address.
It’s a key psychological difference between young men & women; addressing these issues are more likely to actually feel supportive & empowering rather than making them feel “under attack”.
Talking to you young men like defective young women is how the Democratic Party got in this mess to begin with.
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